The Gift by Marcel Mauss
My friend Leif says:
I’ve just started to read, “The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies” by Marcel Mauss, an important cultural anthropologist. It is an absolutely fascinating account of exchange in indigenous societies. I find it highly relevant for free market anti-capitalist, left libertarian, anarchist, and libertarian socialist thought. I’ve posted the first three pages of the introduction on myspace. Its highly recommended.
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=59722264&blogID=430167687
Do read it.
Of course, I shouldn’t fail to note that praxeology indicates all true gift economies are market economies. When gift-giving occurs on a wholly voluntary basis, the giver is giving the gift in order to increase their own subjectively perceived satisfaction and the receiver is accepting the gift in order to increase their own subjectively perceived satisfaction.
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It was a course in economic anthropology, centering on that book, that first prompted me away from more mainstream, right-wing libertarianism (though I never understood why people should just swallow whatever corporations served us).
In my opinion, though, it’s a little simplistic to simply dismiss gift economies as markets by other means. In the sense that they are ways of allocating resources voluntarily, sure. In the sense that there is a much greater social significance to a gift than to a commodity, and that this is much more closely tied up in the social fabric than exchanges that center around a currency, I’d disagree. As any good anarchist knows, the lines between culture, economics, and politics are usually quite arbitrarily drawn by those in control.
On the other hand, Mauss’s point that gift giving is a form of cycling obligation around the community to promote exchange is very market-like (though it relies on something much more subtle and, in many ways, constructive than contracting). It’s not all love and light, either - it’s definitely hierarchical, which is something many anarchists don’t understand about the anthropological record.
Kudos for mentioning it, it should be required reading for left libertarians!
I’m new to this blog, so I’m unsure if you’ve previously discussed David Graeber. He’s an anthropologist and an anarchist who wrote a great article on Mauss. Here’s a link: http://www.freewords.org/graeber.html.
I have a pdf version of The Gift, and I don’t remember where I found it online. If I can find out where I got it, I’ll provide a link. Otherwise, I can probably find a way to get it to others if they’re interested.
Brad, gGlad you were intrigued.
kk, I just picked up Graeber’s latest book Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. I’d suggest starting with Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (pdf link to the whole book) also available at AK Press.
Hi folks. Yes, I have a small degree of familiarity with David Graeber. We redistribute part of Fragments via the zine distro section on Agorism.info, BTW.
Oh yes, I’ve dled some of them texts to distribute with SDS. Luckily, the SDS in the NW is mostly anarchists instead of alphabet soup socialists.
Brad:
Thanks for drawing attention of your blog to Mauss’s important book. For what it’s worth, I would highly recommend Mauss’s work for those libertarians interested in fruitful collaboration with the non-statist socialist left.
Jeremy said:
“It was a course in economic anthropology, centering on that book, that first prompted me away from more mainstream, right-wing libertarianism…”
My experience with the book was strikingly similar to Jeremy’s in this respect. Also featured in the class I took was The World of the Gift by Jacques T. Godbout and Alain Caille, and a book by Lewis Hyde the title of which escapes me at the moment.
Regarding Brad’s point about the compatibility of gift economies with the “market economy,” I think lurking behind this question is a perilous terminological problem:
One might mean by “market economy” any entirely voluntary economy order, where no rights are violated, etc., as opposed to the realm of “power” (in Rothbard’s sense).
Using this broad definition of “market economy,” a pure Maussian gift economy would be simply one particular, permissible configuration of economic life within the parameters of all possible “market economies.”
However, gift economies are quite different from “markets” in the empirical, institutional, and not-purely-formal sense that the term is generally used by non-Austrians (and also paradigmatically for Austrians as well, who will if pressed say that, gift exchange is after all allowed in the “market”…) — that is, the money economy, or market for salable commodities.
In this “market,” people are generally transacting for their own account by binding themselves at a fixed point in time to give up some one thing (which they have the right to keep or withhold) to another in order to induce that other to to give one some desired thing, which one prefers to that which one has given up. — This can be either in a spot exchange or through a written contract.
Upon the conclusion of such a transaction, both party’s thereto are “square,” “even-Stephen,” owing nothing further in the order of gratitude, hospitality, or honor to the other.
It is this second sense of the term “market,” that is modeled by most economics (neo-classical and Austrian, although, formally praxeology “applies” to gift economies as well). In such models, the economy is conceived of as being composed by essentially austistic persons, who have their own private wants (which arrive inexplicably from outside the theory as “windowless monads”), and who try to fulfill those wants by working for as high of wages as possible, and then spending that money buying desired goods as cheaply as possible, and all the while treating those other persons with whom ones deals as a stranger (whose genuine well-being is frankly of no concern to them, except in some instrumental way). Perhaps these economic agents treats each other cordially, but only so as to grease the skids of commerce.
It is over against this model that “gift economics” has a critical intervention to make.
1. In gift economies, one does not only receive what one needs when one has at that moment sufficient assets to make one’s “demand” “effective.” That is, one may receive when one is in need of something, but when because of ill fortune, one has nothing to give in return “do ut des.” This plugs a major lacuna (and some might say “irrationality”) of the “money economy,” where goods are supposedly directed to their “most highly valued uses,” but where what is valued can only be registered as being so valued by the conjunction in some valuer of both the ability and the willingness to part with more money in exchange for the good sought than rival bidders.
2. Gift economies have certain competencies where not everyone always knows what is in his or her own interest. Another, perhaps wiser person may do the choosing for the ultimate recipient of the good, which can lead to better outcomes than always leaving the each person all decisions as to his or her own consumption. Also, as purely voluntary, the recipient is always free to refuse to accept the gift, thus keeping this “educative, or self-canceling hierarchy” well within the bounds of the voluntary order.
3. Gift exchange is not merely the basis of informal existence (inviting friends over for dinner, bringing a bottle of wine to a house warming, birthday presents, etc.), but in fact (on Mauss’s account) “gives the social” itself. Social bonds are forged through gift exchange that have the potential to create common goods (not easily cognized by standard economics), and genuine collectivities.
I look forward to future discussion of this material.
Best,
Araglin
@Araglin — Your detailed insights are themselves a gift. Thank you.
You’re quite welcome. Thanks for doing me the honor of wading through such a disorganized thicket of ideas.